Hang Right Politics

Posted by COgirl on March 29th, 2007 in Democrats, Hooverville, Retreat & Defeat, Taxes

Jim Addison, Wizbang Politics, had a great article on Tuesday about all the pork approved by the Democratic senators and included in the surrender bill, Some pork fat for your retreat, Senator?. Check out Jim’s article, but I’m going to print some of the spending approved by these cowardly individuals.

$24 million for funding for sugar beets.

$13 million for Ewe Lamb Replacement and Retention Program.

$32 million for Livestock Indemnity Program.

$40 million for the Tree Assistance Program.

$100 million for Small Agricultural Dependent Businesses.

$31 million for one month extension of Milk Income Loss Contract program (MILC)

$100 million for security at the Presidential Candidate Nominating Conventions

$2 million for the University of Vermont

The spending in the Wizbang article adds up to $6.5 billion. This is our money, not theirs, yet they throw it around like it’s candy and it’s free. Let me put this in perspective for you. This is about $22 for every man, woman and child living in the United States. We are talking about $88 for a family of four. That could pay for groceries for a week.

It’s hard to know what the true federal deficit of this country is. (See this article from USA Today.) The USA article indicates that the government likes to talk about a figure of $318 billion though it’s probably more than that. But the point is that this pork approved by the Senate is 2% of the deficit.

Aside from the obvious pork in this bill, there’s also this. (Story from Bloomberg.com.)

Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are at work writing budget resolutions. All of them, especially the Democrats, talk about new benefits they intend to extend: an expansion of federal outlays for child-health care in the states, community-health centers, reauthorization of the farm bill — you get the idea. Lawmakers also are planning middle-class breaks, including billions to limit the sting of the alternative minimum tax.

Now let’s fast forward to the flip side of the spending bills and that is how the government is going to pay for that. As the Bloomberg article points out, Congress operates under the pay-as-you-go rule, meaning that they will have to come up with a way to pay for all the pork and Democrat entitlement program increases. And that people, means that WE have to pay for it and there’s only one way Democrats know how to do that and that is to increase our taxes.

Democrats (Charlie Rangel) are being quiet about how they’re going to pay for this, but here are some ideas mentioned in the article.

Consider five possible changes:

The first is the most obvious: raising the top marginal rate on income tax back to President Bill Clinton’s old 39.6 percent levy.

Second, lawmakers would also like to fiddle with the next rungs on the tax ladder. Don’t be surprised if in the name of tax reform Democrats start talking about recalibrating so that the current 28 percent and 33 percent brackets become 36 percent.

A third likely change is especially important for Wall Street, which has enjoyed a tax on dividends of 15 percent for the past several years. Lawmakers are likely to revert to the old system for dividends, under which the payments are treated as ordinary income and taxed up to the top 35 percent rate. Or make that 39.6 percent — if the first of the changes above is made.

Capital gains likewise are under the gun, with the possibility that the tax rate may move back to the 20 percent of the 1990s from the current 15 percent.

Then there is the estate tax, which is already a mess. It phases out under current law in 2010, only to roar back in following years. In order to prevent its revival, lawmakers must enact a new law. Democrats are likely to take advantage of disillusionment at the complexity and write a new law that makes the estate tax, once again, an American fixture.

In other words, taxes would revert back to the pre-9/11 days. The tax increases that the Dems would put in place would undo the very things that have kept our economy going and that helped us recover from the Bill Clinton recession. The Dems and the MSM love to talk about how bad things are now, but when Rangel’s committee is done adjusting the tax code, we really can talk about Hooverville.